Excavations in Three Parts

The
great reward from mining our life experience comes when we
strike that vein of purpose and find that the
seemingly diffused endeavors and commitments of our life
cohere. A hidden pattern is revealed, a “strange attractor”
around which the once random trajectories of our life now
constellate, disclosed. And we arrive at the place where
“everything belongs”—ready, as the poet Yeats says, “to
cast out remorse” and “live it all again and yet again”
(“Dialogue of Self and Soul”).

When I arrived, I could find no
one to show me to my class. I’d been hired—mid-term—to
fill a vacancy caused by an illness or death; and as I
wandered the empty cavernous hallways, gently pushing open
classroom doors, and climbing the wide, seemingly endless
flights of creaky wooden stairs, I became increasing angry
that the school was so poorly managed. I was a teacher, and
somewhere in this ancient building there was a class that
needed me.

Why did God make you?
Every Catholic of a certain age—as part of their early
catechetical drilling—will have been asked this sixth
question from the Baltimore Catechismand been
expected to answer: God made me to know Him, to love Him,
and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him
forever in heaven. If the child took this teaching to
heart, he stepped through a door and embarked on a quest to
untangle the mysterious threads of purpose in his life.

Of the four parts of the answer, it was the third—perhaps
because it seemed the only one I could do something
about, the only area of action in my control—that ignited
my passion. Like all great teaching, the “answer” is just a
trove of further questions: How did I serve
God in this world? What was my calling, my
vocation? What was to be my work in the world?

But there was something too constricted in the way these
questions came to be framed for me. For a life to be worth
living, it had to be a life worth dying for. That became the
test of authenticity. For the child that I was, enfolded by
ritual, with a love for learning and a gift for writing,
there seemed only three career paths that were legitimate: I
could become a priest, a teacher, or a writer.

As I moved through my student years, then into my
householding years, I found myself progressively barred from
each of these paths. In puberty I discovered girls and ruled
out a life of celibacy. I married, started a family, and
embarked on making a living. I couldn’t do it as a writer;
my gift was perhaps too small, my dedication too tepid, or
the demands on my time too many. So I became a teacher.

We were standing at the edge of
the playground with the high fortress-like wall behind us.
To be heard over the noise of the playing children, I had
raised my voice. Tamping his hand down, my colleague
cautioned me. He nodded imperceptibly, and I followed the
direction of his nod to where an old hag of a nun was
watching us from an opened second-story window.

—The principal will hear you.

—And well she should. I’ll tell
her what I think of how this place is run. Do you know what
I’m doing these days… after I wander the hallways for
an hour or two looking for my class? I come out and work in
the garden, just to have something productive to do. No, let
her come talk to me. In fact, I want to see the Registrar.

I finished a master’s degree in creative writing and, in the
fall of 1967, took my first job teaching English at Xavier
University, a Black university in New Orleans. I was
returning to the city of my birth after an absence of 16
years—returning at a strident and tumultuous moment in our
history which, in my own life and the lives of my students,
seemed to call into question the value of teaching and
learning. Martin Luther King was shot during the spring of
1968, and Richard Nixon was elected the following fall.

I left Xavier the following year. Though I’d intended to
pursue a doctorate at Notre Dame, where I’d been an
undergraduate, I found immediately I couldn’t afford that
and instead ended up teaching part-time at several colleges
near South Bend. I left teaching altogether three years
later, after a final year at a prep school.

Though I pursued other career paths in my life—got a
master’s degree in Library Science and worked as a public
librarian, got a doctorate in Educational Administration and
worked as a university administrator—all these endeavors
somehow seemed to come up short, to lack legitimacy,
measured against the standards ingrained in childhood.

The texts I have been inserting are the episodes from a dream—one of a number of powerful dreams I had the year I turned
fifty. It came as a blessing and a dispensation that what
had seemed like no path was indeed a genuine path:

I was using a hoe to weed the
garden plot tucked into a corner where two high walls
intersected, when I caught sight of him striding toward me
across the wide lawn. He was a behemoth of a man, dressed in
a clerical black suit that shimmered as the sun danced over
it. He stopped when he drew close.

—You asked to see the Registrar?
Well, I am the Registrar.

I minced no words telling him
how poorly I thought the school was run. —I am a teacher, I
said, and there are students here who need me.

He ignored my diatribe as he
surveyed my work. Then, looking at me, he said, —So these
are the magnificent gardens everyone is talking about!

I looked about me and saw the
garden—lush and fragrant with flowering plants—as if for
the first time. As we strolled the grounds together, he
admiring the many landscaped areas we came across, I
realized I had somehow managed to create all these beautiful
inviting spaces, as it were, in my spare time. When
we stopped at the end of our circuit, he looked at me.

—You know, at our cloister in
Montreal, I was a gardener too.

The dreams of my fiftieth year presaged tectonic shifts in my
life. For the second time in five years, I was dealing with
prolonged unemployment. My five children were raised, and
the youngest would leave for college in the fall. My
marriage of 28 years was dissolving. With hindsight I see
that a
demarcation line, between a first and second half of life,
was being drawn. Within a fortnight of my “garden dream” I
had moved out of our home in Greensboro, where I’d been
living for 14 years, and taken a position at the University
of North Carolina in Wilmington.

In the dissolution of the partnership with Pugh in early 1862, [Darden] kept ownership of the St. Bernard [plantation which] with 600 argents, had had only forty-one slaves (all listed by family), six cabins, a smaller sugarhouse valued at $4,500, a dwelling worth $1,500 and several lesser such structures.

Wilmington had had a troubled racial history, and the grant
project I was hired to manage had as its focus race
relations. I remember following the news coverage during the
70s of the Wilmington Ten, a group of civil rights
activists who spent nearly a decade in jail for arson and
conspiracy before the questionable verdict was overturned in
1980.

The 1971 incident could be thought of, however, as an
aftershock of a much more gruesome secret buried in
Wilmington’s past. Wilmington near the turn of the last
century had been the most populous city in the state and a
magnet for aspiring Blacks who found opportunity in the
city’s building and shipping trades. Blacks made up 60
percent of the
population and held elected office on the
City Council. On November 10, 1898, a white vigilante mob
gathered before the offices of the state’s only Black daily
newspaper, the WilmingtonDaily Record, to
protest an editorial which the engaged white citizenry
thought had defamed Southern womanhood. After burning down
the building, then posing proudly for their photograph, the
mob marched downtown; deposed the existing council and
installed a rump one in its place; and issued a manifesto,
its “Declaration of White Independence.” For three days
following, Republicans and Black entrepreneurs were put on
trains leaving the city and told not to return. Estimates of
the number of Black citizens who died in the violence go as
high as 300. President William McKinley was kept fully
informed of the events in this, the only instance of the
illegal overthrow of a municipal government in U.S. history.
He turned a blind eye.

When I arrived in Wilmington, the centennial anniversary of
these tumultuous events was approaching. It took minimal
investigative skills to see that dangerous memories1 of the 1898 insurrection were
poisoning race relations and needed to be exorcised in a way
that only their solemn commemoration could accomplish. It
was, however, an initiative that the university would not
lead, sensitive as it had to be to political pressure; in a
quirk of history, three key leaders of the 1898 conspiracy
had living grandsons who bore their exact names and were
prominent citizens in the community as well as current or
former members of the university’s Board of Trustees. In the
end, I helped spearhead the creation of an independent
Foundation and served as its director as we planned, then
implemented, a year-long reconciliation effort.

There seemed to me a great deal of chance about my role in
all of this. Hadn’t I taken the temporary assignment in
Wilmington simply as a last resort—the only available
opening that offered the remotest chance of salvaging my
battered resumé and maintaining some semblance of a career path
that could lead to future employment? Hadn’t I had simply
fallen into a leadership role—not so much an
outside as an accidental agitator? Looking back
now, however, a pattern is discernible. A passion for racial
justice runs through my biography—a vein of purpose—from
my first job teaching at a Black college to my work in
Wilmington. I cannot trace its roots to conscious
experiences: though I grew up in the segregated South, we
left New Orleans, where racial tensions simmered just below
the surface, when I was six; and I grew up in Houston,
insulated by my minority Catholic experience, from racism’s
rawest cultural expressions. If I could be said to have
chosen this work, the part of me that did the
choosing was deeper than ego and consciousness—some sort of bedrock self that knew exactly what it needed
to do.

I’d been in Wilmington two years and was deeply involved
with the centennial commemoration when I received an
unexpected parcel from my mother. The pamphlet it contained—the early history of St. John’s Episcopal Church in
Thibodeaux, LA, written by the first pastor—gives brief
biographies of the founding members of the vestry, including
my great great grandfather, Richardson Gray Darden. The
brief
excerpt inserted earlier that describes the size of his
plantation and the number of slaves he owned is taken from
its text, as is the one below, which, when I first read it,
sent quivers through me:

Richardson Gray Darden was born on August 27, 1809, at Wilmington, North Carolina, one of 13 children of Reddick Darden and Catherine Thomas. [He and two of his brothers] joined the swelling migration of many citizens of that state to … Deep South regions [including Louisiana, where he became] an overseer on sugar cane plantations.

There
is a passage from the novelA Flag for Sunrise
by Robert Stone where the
revolutionary priest, Godoy, is described this way:

He fights for the peasants and
the Indians because whether he knows it or not, he deeply
desires the just rule of the Lord. Probably, he will
never realize this… But I think unconsciously it is the
kingdom of God he fights for.2

I have a visceral memory of a realization that happened
within the past year or two. I don’t remember its context—where I was, what I was doing, what specific matter was the
occasion for the realization. I remember praying silently
that some aspect of my work with Second Journey
would contribute in some small way to the “coming of the
Kingdom,” the words we use in the Lord’s Prayer. Then, as a
postscript, I remember qualifying the sentiment: May I do
this good thing. AND may I do it for the RIGHT REASONS. Not
because I enjoy the work… which I did, immensely. Not
because it taps my creativity… which it did, immensely. But
because it will leave the world a better place.

Catholic theology, distinguishing between ethics and
morality, holds that the merit of an action depends on the
intention of the actor:

So when you give to the needy,
do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in
the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I
tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.
But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand
know what your right hand is doing, so that you’re giving
may be in secret. Then you’re Father, who sees what is done
in secret, will reward you.3

In the incident in question I remember the two thoughts—May I do this good thing. AND may I do it for the RIGHT
REASONS. Then I remember a NEW thought, that came fast on
the heels of the second thought and that signaled a
cataclysmic psychic realignment: “Oh, the hell with that,
let me just do it!”

When we act from a place deeper than ego, from the place of
our deepest joy, we come into alignment with the divine
spark in us and are absolved from asking further questions.

The Streaker

He lit out across the wide lawn,
naked, high stepping, arms flailing,
his pudgy trunk in constant search
for equilibrium. Sister

darted after him, his guardian angel
not seven years his senior, sailing
behind him, the sash of her white
linen shift floating in her wake.

Then catching up with him, she matched
his pace, letting him barrel on
giddily, in his riotous play,
just out of reach and rescue.

Then she turned him and steered him back.
And at the edge from which he’d launched,
scooped him up and — enfolding him —
whirled his giggling body round.

Who — knowing it would be such joy
to collapse into His cunning
Love — would not, like St. Francis — then
and there — strip and light out running?

1 “And if a community is completely honest, it will remember stories not only of suffering received but of suffering inflicted—dangerous memories for they call the community to alter ancient evils”
(Habits of the Heart. New York: Harper and Row, 1985, p. 153).
Information about the 1898 Centennial Commemoration and the
work of the 1898 Foundation can be found at
this link,
which contains further links to other resources.